Darius Rejali on the Efficacy of Torture
Comment and opinion from the Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online
The so-called “ticking bomb” scenario, however, presupposes that torture gets results, whereas the evidence suggests precisely the reverse. Torture did not work in Ulster or Vietnam. The US scholar Darius Rejali [my friend at Swarthmore, who taught me more about political theory than any of my professors!] has trawled the archives of the brutal Algerian war of independence and found no evidence that torture did anything to aid France or delay defeat. Even medieval torturers began to look to other methods once it became clear that the rack and thumbscrews were not producing reliable statements of guilt.
Torture is an effective way of intimidating prisoners; it certainly produces confessions. But as information these tend to be useless, if not actively misleading.
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